Sunday, March 23, 2014

Inspirational Young People

Our previous post
began with a dismal report about our bout with the flu. I am glad to state that we are totally over
that illness and are back at full strength.
We are ready to get back to work!
Our week began with an excellent Stake Conference. This was a stake conference broadcast from
Salt Lake to the whole Northeast United States region. We had some excellent talks. We saw a lot of ward friends at the
conference and there was a very nice spirit there. Late in the evening we got to go on another
teaching visit to one of our favorite young families with the sister
missionaries. This is the family for
whom I blessed their new baby boy. It
was an outstanding visit. We love this
young family so much. We had a good
lesson about prophets and especially about Joseph Smith. As converts to the church Lezlie and I are
able to add our perspective on these things, and we had good discussion with
this couple. We were kind of winding up
and getting ready to go when the husband said, “Now if I wanted to join the
church in May or June do you think we could work that out?” We were all surprised, but in a good
way. He had never mentioned joining the
church before. The sisters said yes we could arrange that, with great big
smiles on their faces. He is going on a
business trip for 2 weeks, but we will see her this week and him again as soon
as he gets back. Then we will try to set
up a schedule of lessons to lead to his baptism in May or June. The reasons he wants to set that as a
goal is because they are getting transferred in mid June, and he really would like
to be a member of the church before he moves.
We are so happy for them and excited to be a part of their spiritual
journey. Lezlie made a heartfelt
statement to them that even if we weren’t missionaries we would love them,
would want to spend time with them, and would want to help teach them. We told them if he joined, and if a year later
they get sealed in the temple, that we will make every effort to travel to
their home in Arizona to go to the temple with them.

We are on daylight
savings time, it is late March, we live in Virginia, and Spring is only 4 days
away. But we still woke up on Monday
morning to about 6 inches of snow. We are
tired of this snow. This is Virginia for
goodness sake!. This has been a record snow
year for northern Virginia. The locals
say it is the worst they have seen in twenty years. We just want the real spring weather to
arrive. We know that July and August
will be hot and humid, so we are looking forward to the warm and pleasant days
of spring. Our only big activity today was to provide dinner to two wonderful young
sisters that live in our apartments. They
are both from Utah. One is a music major
at BYU and the other just worked for two years before her mission. She is not sure what she will do when she
goes home, but thinks she wants to be a hairdresser. These missionaries never cease to surprise us
because they do not fit any mold. We
have met some that want to be doctors and engineers and some that want to be
mechanics or just work in the family business.
We had a great time visiting with these two young sisters and getting to
know them better. Lezlie made a
scrumptious pavlova desert. (You would
have been proud Rex, it was magnificent.)
Happy St Patrick’s Day to all!

We also spent two full
days in training for the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society. The society just got new computers with
Windows 8.1 and updated Microsoft Office products. And the computers are touch screen. It is really cool. We had excellent training on the touch screen
features as well as the upgraded programs.
It was fun to get to play with the laptops and the new software. As part of the training we were treated to
lunch at the Quantico Base Officer’s Club.
They serve an excellent lunch buffet, and it was great fun to compare
stories with the other volunteers.

On Tuesday we had a
wonderful dinner at the marine family with the new baby girl that I helped
bless. It is always fun to visit with
this family, play with their 4 year old boy, and hold baby Charlotte. They fed us an excellent beef stew and we had
carrot cake that Lezlie had baked.
Yum. It is such a joy to see this
young family. Three months ago they were
so concerned about the health of both mom and the unborn baby. It is so good to see them healthy. We held our normal Tuesday night family home
evening for our Basic School marines. We
had a smaller turnout than normal because a couple of guys were on duty. But we still had five enthusiastic attendees
and we had an interesting discussion on apostasy. We covered both the great apostasy and also
how to avoid personal apostasy. It is
fascinating to initiate these discussion with this group because they all are
so intelligent and well versed in the scriptures. They have amazing insights and comments. They all loved the carrot cake and German
chocolate cake we provided. It a very
long day, but we were happy and full of a wonderful sense of accomplishment
when we arrived home.

On another evening we
had two young elders over for dinner (see picture). It was great fun. The taller Elder is a Tongan from Hawaii and
a very interesting young man. He told us
about his adventures in Hawaii and about his large Tongan family. The other Elder is from Utah and is one of
our favorites that lives in our apartment complex right now. We enjoyed the
dinner and visiting with these great young men.

One of our ongoing jobs
is to inspect the apartments of the young sisters and missionaries. The Church leases all these apartments and
wants to make sure they are kept up.
Also, these young missionaries are engaged in serious spiritual work,
and they need to have a wholesome, bright atmosphere in their apartments so
that they can study, plan and work well.
The apartment inspections are always a fun assignment and not too
difficult. We found mostly very clean
apartments. They were very conscientious
about fixing things from the last inspection.
We heard several comments like, “Hey Sister Couch, did you check out
those blinds this time,” or “We have the cleanest microwave in the whole
mission today.” One of the sets of young
elders had a bad apartment last time, but this time it was excellent.
So we told them they had the most improved apartment and took them out
to a nice lunch. Afterwards we spent
some time completing our assigned apartment inspections. One of our most impressive apartments was the
one that belonged to the two Elders we just had over for dinner, pictured
above. As mentioned, the one Elder is
from Hawaii. When we walked in there was
some soft Hawaiian music playing. They also
had two scented candles burning and offered us a piece of candy. Besides this, their apartment was simply
immaculate. We were generous with our
praise. Not only was it a nice,
wholesome apartment in which to live.
But the cleanliness and order made it seem like a spiritual place to
live.

Saturday we were
pleased to be able to attend a senior missionary activity. We have thirty senior missionaries in the
Virginia Richmond, and we get together every 2 or 3 months. Our mission president happened to meet an
older couple in one of the wards he visited.
The couple told him that they had recently returned from a mission to
Paris. They went on to explain that they
owned a restored plantation mansion that they had converted into a bed and
breakfast. They offered the use of their
place for a senior missionary activity, so that is where we met. Although it was a long drive, about 2.5 hours
for us, it was a delightful get together.
It is so great to chat with the other senior missionaries and compare
stories and experiences. We always enjoy
visiting with the couple from Pasco, Washington (their mom used to go to our
ward), as well as the other military relations couple that serves on an Army
Base near Richmond. We had a short
training and information meeting, and then had a wonderful lunch prepared by
the owners and their helper – ham and potato casserole, homemade bread, fresh
fruit, grape leaves with rice, and cherry cobbler. The owners told about their experiences on
their mission in Paris. They had worked
at the church visitor’s center in downtown Paris. They said that one way they could get people
to come in was to leave the door open and play the piano. People would wander in to listen to the
music. So as we gathered inside the
mansion to begin a tour the husband sat down and played a couple of wonderful
piano pieces. He was a retired doctor
but sounded like he could have been a retired concert pianist. His wife had studied art history, and covered
the walls of the mansion with hundreds of beautiful paintings. It was a magnificent home and we enjoyed the
tour greatly. It was a great get
together. On the way home we stopped at the
Sailor’s Creek Battleground Park. This
was the location of the last battle between Robert E Lee and Ulysses S
Grant. The Union army decisively beat
the Confederates, wiping out about a fourth of the rebel army to casualties and
surrenders. It was just 3 days later that
Lee surrendered at Appomattox, just a few miles away. It is always interesting to see these Civil
War sites, but also sad and sobering to think of all the soldiers that died
there. It was a long drive home, but we thoroughly
enjoyed the activity.

We experienced a wonderful Sunday here in northern
Virginia, with sunny skies and soft breezes. But Spring is struggling to get out of the
gate. Although we have had a few sunny days, snow is again in the forecast for Tuesday. Ugh! We have had more than enough of that here. We had some exceptionally good talks today- from
a young marine couple that are moving next month. He is a marine and she is an ex-marine. They actually met at marine Officer Candidate
School when she invited him to attend church. He was eventually baptized and they got married.
They both gave talks on forgiveness that
were simply excellent. They talked about
how lack of forgiveness usually is worse for the person holding the grudge than
for the person that did the wrong. So true! We had very good lessons at the rest of our meetings
as well. After services today we had a linger
longer, which is a post church service potluck (see picture). We have these once a month, and this one was
very well attended. We have come to know
and love the great people here. We were
looking around today and we were amazed that we knew the names of almost everyone
in the room. We have sure come to love these people, and we
already realize how hard it is going to be to say goodbye one day. We will always have a very warm spot in our hearts
for Virginia and the good folks here. We
surely love our missionary work here. We
feel grateful to be involved not only with our great ward family, but also with
two groups of exceptional young people.
We feel totally blessed to be working with the marines and the young
missionaries. They inspire us and not only make
us feel younger but very confident of the future of the world.